Study Sheds Light on How Populations Respond and Adapt to Climate Change

WACO, Texas (Feb. 16, 2015) — Using a relatively new scientific dating technique, a Baylor University geologist and a team of international researchers were able to document—for the first time—a drastic climate change 4,200 years ago in northern China that affected vegetation and led to mass migration from the area.

Steve Forman, Ph.D., professor of geology in the College of Arts & Sciences, and researchers—using a dating technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence—uncovered the first evidence of a severe decrease in precipitation on the freshwater lake system in China’s Hunshandake Sandy Lands. The impact of this extreme climate change led to desertification—or drying of the region—and the mass migration of northern China’s Neolithic cultures.

“With our unique scientific capabilities, we are able to assert with confidence that a quick change in climate drastically changed precipitation in this area, although, further study needs to be conducted to understand why this change occurred,” Forman said.

Between 2001 and 2014, the researchers investigated sediment sections throughout the Hunshandake and were able to determine that a sudden and irreversible shift in the monsoon system led to the abrupt drying of the Hunshandake resulting in complications for the population.

“This disruption of the water flow significantly impacted human activities in the region and limited water availability. The consequences of a rapid climatic shift on the Hunshandake herding and agricultural cultures were likely catastrophic,” Forman said.

He said these climatic changes and drying of the Hunshandake continue to adversely impact the current population today. The Hunshandake remains arid and even with massive rehabilitation efforts will unlikely regrow dense vegetation.

Forman is the director of the Geoluminescence Dating Research Lab in the department of geology.

Study co-authors include: Xiaoping Yang, Ph.D., of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Louis A. Scuderi, Ph.D., of the University of New Mexico; Xulong Wang, Ph.D., of Chinese Academy of Sciences; Louis J. Scuderi, Ph.D., of the University of Hawaii; Deguo Zhang, Ph.D., of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Hongwei Li, Ph.D., of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Qinghai Xu, Ph.D., of Hebei Normal University; Ruichang Wang, Ph.D., of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences; Weiwen Huang, Ph.D., of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and Shixia Yang, Ph.D., of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.

President Obama and President Xi Jinping of China, with their delegations, met inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Wednesday.CreditMandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIJING — China and the United States made common cause on Wednesday against the threat of climate change, staking out an ambitious joint plan to curb carbon emissions as a way to spur nations around the world to make their own cuts in greenhouse gases.

The landmark agreement, jointly announced here by President Obama and President Xi Jinping, includes new targets for carbon emissions reductions by the United States and a first-ever commitment by China to stop its emissions from growing by 2030.

Administration officials said the agreement, which was worked out quietly between the United States and China over nine months and included a letter from Mr. Obama to Mr. Xi proposing a joint approach, could galvanize efforts to negotiate a new global climate agreement by 2015.

It was the signature achievement of an unexpectedly productive two days of meetings between the leaders. Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi also agreed to a military accord designed to avert clashes between Chinese and American planes and warships in the tense waters off the Chinese coast, as well as an understanding to cut tariffs for technology products.

A climate deal between China and the United States, the world’s No. 1 and No. 2 carbon polluters, is viewed as essential to concluding a new global accord. Unless Beijing and Washington can resolve their differences, climate experts say, few other countries will agree to mandatory cuts in emissions, and any meaningful worldwide pact will be likely to founder.

“The United States and China have often been seen as antagonists,” said a senior official, speaking in advance of Mr. Obama’s remarks. “We hope that this announcement can usher in a new day in which China and the U.S. can act much more as partners.”

As part of the agreement, Mr. Obama announced that the United States would emit 26 percent to 28 percent less carbon in 2025 than it did in 2005. That is double the pace of reduction it targeted for the period from 2005 to 2020.

China’s pledge to reach peak carbon emissions by 2030, if not sooner, is even more remarkable. To reach that goal, Mr. Xi pledged that so-called clean energy sources, like solar power and windmills, would account for 20 percent of China’s total energy production by 2030.

Administration officials acknowledged that Mr. Obama could face opposition to his plans from a Republican-controlled Congress. While the agreement with China needs no congressional ratification, lawmakers could try to roll back Mr. Obama’s initiatives, undermining the United States’ ability to meet the new reduction targets.

Still, Mr. Obama’s visit, which came days after a setback in the midterm elections, allowed him to reclaim some of the momentum he lost at home. As the campaign was turning against the Democrats last month, Mr. Obama quietly dispatched John Podesta, a senior adviser who oversees climate policy, to Beijing to try to finalize a deal.

For all the talk of collaboration, the United States and China also displayed why they are still fierce rivals for global economic primacy, promoting competing free-trade blocs for the Asian region even as they reached climate and security deals.

The maneuvering came during a conference of Pacific Rim economies held in Beijing that has showcased China’s growing dominance in Asia, but also the determination of the United States, riding a resurgent economy, to reclaim its historical role as a Pacific power.

Adding to the historic nature of the visit, Mr. Obama and Mr. Xi were scheduled to give a joint news conference on Wednesday that will include questions from reporters — a rare concession by the Chinese leader to a visiting American president.

On Tuesday evening, Mr. Xi invited Mr. Obama to dinner at his official residence, telling his guest he hoped they had laid the foundation for a collaborative relationship — or, as he more metaphorically put it, “A pool begins with many drops of water.”

Greeting Mr. Obama at the gate of the walled leadership compound next to the Forbidden City, Mr. Xi squired him across a brightly lighted stone bridge and into the residence. Mr. Obama told the Chinese president that he wanted to take the relationship “to a new level.”

“When the U.S. and China are able to work together effectively,” he added, “the whole world benefits.”

But as the world witnessed this week, it is more complicated than that. Mr. Xi won approval Tuesday from the 21 countries of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum to study the creation of a China-led free-trade zone that would be an alternative to Mr. Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a 12-nation trading bloc that excludes China.

On Monday, Mr. Obama met with members of that group here and claimed progress in negotiating the partnership, a centerpiece of his strategic shift to Asia.

Negotiations for the Trans-Pacific Partnership are much further along than those for the nascent Chinese plan, known as the Free Trade Area of Asia Pacific, and some analysts said the approval by the Pacific Rim nations of a two-year study was mainly a gesture to the Chinese hosts to give them something to announce at the meeting.

For all the jockeying, the biggest trade headline was a breakthrough in negotiations with China to eliminate tariffs on information technology products, from video-game consoles and computer software to medical equipment and semiconductors.

The understanding, American officials said, opens the door to expanding a World Trade Organization agreement on these products, assuming other countries can be persuaded to accept the same terms. With China on board, officials predicted a broader deal would be reached swiftly.

“We’re going to take what’s been achieved here in Beijing back to Geneva to work with our W.T.O. partners,” said Michael B. Froman, the United States trade representative. “While we don’t take anything for granted, we’re hopeful that we’ll be able to work quickly” to conclude an expansion of the agreement, known as the Information Technology Agreement.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Xi formally welcomed Mr. Obama at a ceremony in the Great Hall of the People; they later toasted each other at a state banquet.

Administration officials said Mr. Obama had pressed Mr. Xi to resume a United States-China working group on cybersecurity issues, which abruptly stopped its discussions after the United States charged several Chinese military officers with hacking.

“We did see a chill in the cyber dialogue,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the deputy national security adviser. “We do believe it’s better if there’s a mechanism for dialogue.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama credited APEC with originating the work on reducing tariffs, saying, “The United States and China have reached an understanding that we hope will contribute to a rapid conclusion of the broader negotiations in Geneva.”

Talks with China over expanding the 1997 accord on information technology broke down last year over the scope of the products covered by the agreement. But after intensive negotiations leading up to Mr. Obama’s visit, Mr. Froman said, the Americans and the Chinese agreed Monday evening to eliminate more than 200 categories of tariffs.

While the United States still exports many high-technology goods, China is the world’s dominant exporter of electronics and has much to gain from an elimination of tariffs. Taiwan, South Korea and Japan increasingly find themselves supplying China’s huge electronics industry, deepening their dependence on decisions made in Beijing.

The administration estimated that expanding the Information Technology Agreement would create up to 60,000 jobs in the United States by eliminating tariffs on goods that generate $1 trillion in sales a year. About $100 billion of those products are American-made. The administration faces a longer path on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, including whether Mr. Obama will obtain fast-track trade authority from Congress. That could make it easier for the United States to extract concessions from other countries, since they would have more confidence that the treaty would be ratified by Congress.

While Mr. Froman conceded that sticking points remained, he said, “It’s become clearer and clearer what the landing zones are.” He said that Mr. Obama would seek fast-track authority, but that the best way for him to win congressional passage of the Trans-Pacific Partnership would be to negotiate the best deal.

Li Haiwen, 47, grows medicinal plants, rather than grain, on the plot of land he rents from the local government in Yangling. “The more grain you plant,” he said, “the poorer you get.” Credit Gilles Sabrie for The New York Times

YANGLING, China — For about 4,000 years, farming in this region has been a touchstone of Chinese civilization. It was here that the mythic hero Hou Ji is said to have taught Chinese how to grow grain, and the area’s rich harvests underpinned China’s first dynasties, feeding officials and soldiers in the nearby imperial capital.

But nowadays, Yangling’s fields are in disarray. Frustrated by how little they earn, the ablest farmers have migrated to cities, hollowing out this rural district in the Chinese heartland. Left behind are people like Hui Zongchang, 74, who grows wheat and corn on a half-acre plot while his son works as a day laborer in the metropolis of Xi’an to the east.

Mr. Hui, still vigorous despite a stoop, said he makes next to no money from farming. He tills the earth as a kind of insurance. “What land will they farm if I don’t keep this going?” he said of his children. “Not everyone makes it in the city.”

The nation’s Communist leaders have declared that fixing the countryside is crucial to maintaining social stability. Last year, they unveiled a new blueprint for economic reform with agricultural policy as a centerpiece. But the challenge confronting them resembles a tangled knot.

It begins with the fact that farms in China are too small to generate large profits, about 1.6 acres on average, compared with 400 acres in the United States. Yet it is difficult to consolidate these farms into larger, more efficient operations because Chinese farmers do not own their plots — they lease them from the government.

Privatizing farmland would allow market forces to create bigger farms. But that would be a political minefield for the Communist Party. It would also risk exacerbating inequality, by concentrating land ownership in the hands of a few while leaving many rural families without farms to fall back on if they hit hard times in the cities.

“All of these issues are interlocked and require a series of reforms to be solved,” said Luo Jianchao, a professor at Northwest A & F University in Yangling, and a government adviser. “There’s no magic bullet.”

In late September, President Xi Jinping endorsed an experiment underway in Yangling and other parts of China to untangle this knot. The measure, called liuzhuan, stops short of privatization but gives farmers land-use rights that they can transfer to others in exchange for a rental fee.

The goal is to simulate a private land market and allow China’s family-run, labor-intensive farms to change hands and be amalgamated into large-scale, industrialized businesses. In theory, liuzhuan allows this to happen without cutting ties between rural families and the land, because they collect rental fees as a safety net.

Mr. Xi has presented the policy as critical to China’s next phase of economic reform. Skeptics, however, say it shows the government remains unwilling to consider a bold measure that has worked in many countries: giving farmers full ownership of their land.

“Privatization of land is a key issue but it’s completely taboo,” said Tao Ran, an agricultural expert at Renmin University in Beijing. The party leadership, he said, “cannot countenance it.”

More is at stake than the socialist credentials of the Communist Party, which came to power in a peasant revolution in 1949 and immediately collectivized farmland. State ownership of land is also a major source of government revenue. In areas near cities, local officials often rezone agricultural land and flip it to developers at a huge premium, sometimes setting off violent protests by residents who are left out.

Others see the system of political control of the countryside at stake. “The rural system they’ve had since the 1950s is based on the state ownership of land,” said Fred Gale, who writes an influential blog on China’s agricultural sector called Dim Sums. “If this unravels, then the bureaucrats would be at a loss as to how to manage the countryside.”

In Yangling, a district of 155,000 people that has been a center for agricultural sciences since the 1930s, several problems with the government’s attempt to sidestep privatization are apparent.

Because farmers do not own their land, they cannot sell it and get a large, lump sum payment that could be used to make a new start. Nor can they mortgage land for funds that could be reinvested in their farms or in other businesses.

Yang Tewang, a branch manager of the state-run Yangling Rural Commercial Bank, said he has made about $3 million in mortgage-style loans since the liuzhuan experiment began. But he said they were not true mortgages since the banks cannot repossess land if the farmer defaults — the state owns the land, not the farmer. As a result, Mr. Yang said he minimizes risk by lending only to large-scale vegetable and fruit farmers.

“The rest don’t pay,” he said. A grain farmer, for example, could never get a loan, he said.

Another problem has been figuring out how to set the rental fees that rural families collect if they transfer their land-use rights.

Yangling set up a land bank that took over land-use rights in an area of 36 square miles, then set an annual rental fee of at least $750 per acre of land. Farmers could choose between giving up their land and collecting that rent, or leasing their land back from the state and continuing to farm.

But the fees can distort the market. For example, they have discouraged production of grain, which does not sell for enough of a margin over the cost of renting the land. Grain pays only about $1,250 per acre, for an annual profit of about $500, said one resident, Li Haiwen.

“The more grain you plant,” he said, “the poorer you get.”

Mr. Li grows magnolia bushes used in traditional Chinese medicine instead. But he said farming is just a sideline for him. His main source of income is in professional landscaping. “I think our minds are opening up and we realize there are other ways to make money,” he said.

Exactly why rental prices are so high is open to debate. In some parts of China, rents are even higher than in Yangling, topping $1,200 per acre. By contrast, the average acre of farmland in the United States rented for $136 in 2013, according to the United States Department of Agriculture. Some experts say the rental fees have been driven up by the same sort of speculation that has made apartments so exorbitantly expensive in Chinese cities. Even in a remote area like Yangling, an apartment of 1,000 square feet sells for $50,000, and in cities like Beijing the price can easily be 10 times that.

In recent months, banks like the China International Trust and Investment Corporation have been buying rural land-use rights at high prices. Li Ping, an agricultural expert at Landesa, a nongovernmental organization focused on rural issues, said he believed the purchases have been made with an eye toward rezoning land for housing or industrial use.

“It’s like the housing prices here being higher than in most parts of the U.S.,” Mr. Li said. “It’s not sustainable.”

One of the success stories in Yangling has been the case of Zhang Hongli, who took over 197 acres once farmed by three villages and pays about $150,000 per year in rental fees.

Mr. Yang, the banker, described it as a win-win exchange. Mr. Zhang uses the land to grow watermelons, which sell for a nice profit in Xi’an. Meanwhile, the families who gave up their land are collecting about $500 per year on average, and almost all received free apartments from the government as well.

Government planners hope that more farmers will be moved to the cities so the countryside gradually depopulates and ever-larger-scale farming takes over. For farmers with a job already lined up in the city, this system is attractive. But for people still wanting to work the land, like Zhou Yuansheng, 66, it is an example of how little say he has.

“The big decisions are made by the government,” he said. “No one asked me what I wanted to do with my land.”

Amy Qin contributed research.

A version of this article appears in print on October 13, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: China Attempts to Shift Its Agricultural Burden.

If the world’s biggest polluter doesn’t radically reduce the amount of coal it burns, nothing anyone does to stabilize the climate will matter. Inside the slow, frustrating — and maybe even hopeful — struggle to find a new way forward

As the sun rises in mid-july over andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C., Secretary of State John Kerry climbs quickly – he’s positively bouncing – up the carpeted stairs of his blue-and-white government­issue 757. Kerry is heading to Beijing to talk with Chinese leaders about, among other things, one of President Obama’s top priorities in the waning days of his second term: the urgent need to reduce carbon pollution and limit the damage from climate change. But the rest of the world isn’t cutting Kerry any slack right now – there’s trouble with the elections in Afghanistan, rising conflict in the Middle East and upcoming negotiations with Iran on nuclear weapons. As he ducks into the plane, Kerry is already talking intensely on his cellphone, deeply wired into the global chaos. An aide shoulders his bags as well as a large black case that contains his acoustic guitar, which he takes with him everywhere and often plays late at night when he’s alone in his hotel room.

For nearly a decade, the U.S. and China, the two most powerful nations on the planet, have met every year to talk about how to run the world together. When the talks began in 2006, they focused on issues like currency-exchange rates, trade barriers and China’s never-ending disputes with Taiwan. In 2009, shortly after Obama’s inauguration, the U.S. pushed to add climate change to the mix, hoping that a better understanding between the U.S. and China would lead to a better deal at the Copenhagen climate summit that year. (It didn’t help – mistrust between the countries was a large part of the reason why the talks imploded.)

This year’s U.S. delegation includes many of the administration’s most influential climate hawks – Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, top climate negotiator Todd Stern and John Podesta, counselor to Obama, who has become the administration’s de facto point man for climate policy. This is the diplomatic equivalent of a full-court press. In the past couple of years, Obama has made some important moves, including investing billions in clean energy, jacking up vehicle-efficiency standards and proposing rules to limit pollution from U.S. coal plants. But climate change is a global issue. Unless the West can persuade other countries to take climate action seriously, nothing any single nation does is going to matter much when it comes to solving the problem.

Except, that is, for China. The blunt truth is that what China decides to do in the next decade will likely determine whether or not mankind can halt – or at least ameliorate – global warming. The view among a number of prominent climate scientists is that if China’s emissions peak around 2025, we may – just barely – have a shot at stabilizing the climate before all hell breaks loose. But the Chinese have resisted international pressure to curb their emissions. For years, they have used the argument that they are poor, the West is rich, and that the high levels of carbon in the atmosphere were caused by America’s and Europe’s 200-year-long fossil­fuel binge. Climate change is your problem, they argued – you deal with it. But that logic doesn’t hold anymore. China is set to become the largest economy in the world this year, and in 2006, it passed the U.S. as the planet’s largest carbon polluter. China now dumps 10 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. That number is expected to grow to 15 billion tons by 2030, dwarfing the pollution of the rest of the world. If that happens, then the chances that the world will cut carbon pollution quickly enough to avert dangerous climate change is, according to Kevin Anderson, deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the U.K., “virtually zero.”

John Kerry knows this. He also knows that when the nations of the world gather in Paris next December to try to hammer out a global climate agreement, it may be the last best chance to address this problem before the Years of Living Dangerously begin. Like other climate negotiations held under the banner of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Paris meeting is likely to be warped by 25-year-old grudges and a profound sense of distrust. “But right now, Paris is the only game we have,” one member of the State Department’s climate team told me. “If it fails, there is no Plan B.”

In Beijing, one of Kerry’s goals will be to find out all he can about China’s strategy for Paris – what kind of commitment the Chinese might make, how sincere they are, what tactics they will use. But for Kerry, this is anything but a straightforward conversation, because it’s twisted up in the shadow play of U.S.-China relations, which are marked by suspicion, paranoia and saber rattling on both sides as the U.S. adjusts to China’s rising power in the world. “What we are living through now is the end of 500 years of Western predominance,” historian Niall Ferguson has written. The issue is not whether China will challenge America’s dominance, but when and how.

Shortly before takeoff, Kerry wanders down the aisle to chat. He talks idly about his July 4th celebration and the recent storm damages to his house on Nantucket. But when asked about his expectations for the Beijing summit, he looks grave: “Frankly, we’re not sure where this is all going.” He remembers what happened in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, when the U.S. was mocked for signing an agreement that the Senate would never ratify, and in Copenhagen in 2009, when Obama arrived at a conference that was supposed to save the world but ended up being gridlocked by squabbles over money and emissions targets. Kerry is determined not to let that happen again.

After 25 years of failed climate negotiations, it’s easy to be cynical about the upcoming talks in Paris. But there are at least three factors that make a meaningful agreement next year possible.

The first is that climate change is no longer a hypothetical problem – it’s happening in real time all around us. Droughts, floods, more destructive storms, weird weather of all sorts – just look out your window. In the latest reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s top scientists called the fact that the Earth is warming “unequivocal” and stated that humans are the cause of it. Without dramatic action, the planet could warm up as much as 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 F) by the end of the century, which would be catastrophic. As Kerry said of a report last September, “The response must be all hands on deck. It’s not about one country making a demand of another. It’s the science itself demanding action from all of us.”

The second factor is that until now, the biggest obstacle to an international agreement to reduce carbon pollution has been the United States. But that’s starting to change. Thanks to Obama’s recent crackdown on pollution, as well as the boom in cheap natural gas, which has displaced dirty coal, carbon emissions in the U.S. are on the decline. “What the president has done is very important,” says Robert Stavins, director of the Harvard Project on Climate Agreements. “It allows the U.S. to look at other countries and say, ‘Hey, what are you doing?'”

The final reason for hope, paradoxically, is China’s relentless demand for energy. China is in the midst of a profound economic and social transformation, trying to reinvent itself from an economy based on selling cheap goods overseas to an economy based on selling quality consumer goods at home, while keeping growth rates high and cutting dependence on fossil fuels. Energy demand is expected to double by 2030, and at that pace, there is not enough oil, coal and gas in the world to keep their economy humming. So China’s ongoing energy security depends on the nation developing alternative energy sources in a big way. “We need more of everything,” says Peggy Liu, a sustainability leader who works across China. “Wind, solar, a modernized grid. We need to leapfrog over the past and into a clean-energy future.”

China’s leaders are also waking up to the fact that recent decades of hypergrowth, most of it fired by coal, have exacted a steep price. Air pollution in China’s big cities is among the worst in the world; one recent report found that poor air quality contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in 2010. As Hank Paulson, former Secretary of the Treasury and longtime China observer, has put it, “What is another point of GDP worth, if dirty air is killing people?” Earlier this year, a riot broke out in Zhongtai, a town in eastern China, when protests against a new waste incinerator turned violent, leaving police vehicles torched and at least 39 people injured; in southern China, protests erupted over the construction of a coal-fired power plant. Similar clashes are increasingly frequent in China as pollution-related illnesses rise.

And it’s not just the air that’s a problem in China. More than 20 percent of the country’s farmland is polluted. Sixty percent of its groundwater supply is unfit for human consumption. Rivers are industrial sewers. Last year, 16,000 swollen and rotting dead pigs were found dumped in the Huangpu River near Shanghai.

What looks to be the impacts of climate change are starting to register too. Droughts have become longer and more frequent, forcing China to import ever-increasing amounts of staples like wheat and soy. By one count, 28,000 rivers in China have vanished. China’s southern provinces have the opposite problem: devastating floods as a result of intense rainfall. In addition, much of the coastline, including cities like Shanghai, are highly vulnerable to sea-level rise.

Chinese leaders know this trajectory is unsustainable – economically and politically. Earlier this year, Premier Li Keqiang “declared war” on pollution. Party leaders in China now routinely talk about the importance of “rebalancing the economy” and creating an “ecological civilization.” China Daily, the Communist Party house organ, regularly runs stories about air pollution and toxic waste. While I was in Beijing, I asked U.S. Ambassador to China Max Baucus why the Chinese were now willing to talk so openly about environmental issues. “The fragility of their government,” he said bluntly. “They will have a social revolt on their hands if they don’t come up with a way of dealing with this.”

So a big push for clean energy makes a lot of sense. In fact, you could easily argue that China has already done far more than the U.S. to transform its energy supply: Including hydropower, renewables now make up 20 percent of the energy mix (compared to 13 percent in the U.S.), a share targeted to double by 2030. China is the largest producer of wind and solar power on the planet. In 2013, nearly 60 percent of new-power generation was renewable. They also have 28 new nuclear plants under construction, more than any other country. Policywise, Chinese leaders have also been innovative. In the U.S., neither a carbon tax nor a cap-and-trade system to put a price on carbon pollution is under serious consideration; in contrast, China’s carbon-trading program, which includes more than 2,000 pollution sources, is the second-largest trading system in the world (after the EU’s). “If China is successful in using market forces to cap carbon and transform its economy, that may be the best shot we have to limit climate change,” says Dan Dudek, vice president of the Environmental Defense Fund.

The problem for China, in a word, is coal: About 70 percent of the country’s electrical power comes from burning dirty rocks. The Chinese consumed nearly 4 billion tons in 2012, almost as much as the rest of the world combined. Like the oil industry in the U.S., the coal industry has enormous sway in China, making it all the more difficult to kick the habit. But as the rising power of the 21st century, China is under enormous political pressure to behave responsibly, lest it be seen as a pariah like Russia. “The choices that Chinese leaders make in the next decade will be absolutely pivotal to solving the climate crisis,” says former Vice President Al Gore. And for China’s economic and social stability, the consequences couldn’t be higher. “Politically, it’s very difficult to be fingered as the one most responsible for a looming catastrophe,” Gore continues. Or, as Harvard’s Stavins says, “If it’s your century, you don’t obstruct – you lead.”

In the decade or so after 9/11, when U.S. foreign policy revolved around hunting down and killing Islamic terrorists, we didn’t make China a priority. Then in 2011, the Obama administration announced an “Asia pivot” in U.S. foreign policy to counter China’s rising influence. Among other things, the U.S. increased its military presence and surveillance missions in the region, stoking suspicion in China that one of the goals of U.S. foreign policy is to “contain” China – both economically and militarily (if it were, the U.S. was certainly not going to admit it).

China’s response only seemed to play into our fears. China had been investing in new long-range missiles, upgrading its navy, and began using its new muscle­ to claim disputed territory in the South China Sea. China has been playing more subtle games, too: blocking access to Google and The New York Times, and having hackers raid computers at a number of U.S. corporations, stealing trade secrets. Foreign-policy journals openly speculate about the possibility of war with China, a suggestion that U.S. officials dismiss as absurd. “If there is a war between the U.S. and China,” argues Cheng Li, director of the China program at the Brookings Institution, “it will not be over economics or security, it will be because of misjudgment and misunderstanding.”

Of course, even the most rabid warmongers realize that a war between the U.S. and China would be disastrous. That’s one reason why leaders on both sides are looking for common ground – and two of the biggest shared interests are climate and energy. “In a relationship fraught with tension, these are places where we can do business,” says Obama’s adviser Podesta.

On the flight to Beijing, there is a lot of talk about what that common ground between the U.S. and China might look like. Granted, climate catastrophe is bad for everyone. But what leverage does the U.S. really have over China? On a practical level, the Chinese would like access to American technology. (“The deal here is that the U.S. will let you buy lots of energy equipment at exorbitant prices,” jokes one journalist on the flight.) But the Chinese also understand that, given the GOP-held Congress, Obama doesn’t have the power to make any big future commitments to cut carbon pollution – and so why should they?

On a more human level, there’s also a lot of nervousness about China’s notorious difficulty as a negotiating partner. “China has a very top-down culture – you have to speak to people right at the top,” one of Kerry’s top advisers tells me. “And they are very motivated on climate, due to air-pollution issues. But it’s hard to get China to do hard things, in part because, unlike other Asian countries, doing things for the greater good is not a big motivation for them.”

The mismatch between the urgency of taking action and the self-destructive diddling of diplomacy is frightening to witness. A few weeks before heading to China with Kerry, I attended a UNFCCC climate conference in Bonn, Germany. The two-week-long meeting, one of several designed to begin mapping out an agreement for Paris next year, was held in the gray, bureaucratic-feeling Maritim Hotel near the banks of the Rhine and attended by nearly 2,000 delegates from more than 180 countries. But neither John Kerry nor Todd Stern was anywhere to be found; the U.S. delegation was headed by Trigg Talley, an affable white-haired man who is one of Stern’s deputies. If Bonn was a preview of how things will go next year in Paris, then you can kiss human civilization goodbye. Because nothing will get done. And if it appears that something might get done, you can be sure that somebody – most likely the Saudis, who are infamous for their ability to throw a monkey wrench into negotiations at the last minute – will do everything they can to derail it.

The sheer tedium of the discussions is difficult to capture, but let me try: During the plenary session on the final day, which was held in a conference room the size of a football field and was supposed to be where important breakthroughs were announced, I listened for hours to delegates from Singapore discuss the kind of formatting that should be used on the proposal and to delegates from Bolivia argue that bullet points should be used, not paragraph breaks. I never heard the words “carbon” or “greenhouse gas” in the entire session (although “adaptation” got tossed around a lot). The most memorable words were spoken by a delegate from South Africa: “We are sheep in need of herding.”

In Bonn, the stench of nearly 25 years of broken promises and failed agreements was palpable. The U.S. was viewed with particular skepticism and disdain, not just because the U.S. signed but then failed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, but because until this administration, American presidents and congressional leaders never did anything intentional to substantively curb carbon pollution, despite the obvious impacts it would have on poorer nations. “You talk a lot, but you are not sincere,” one Turkish delegate sniffed to me. Trust in U.S. negotiators had been further undermined when documents made public by WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden revealed that the U.S. had been spying on negotiators from other countries before and during Copenhagen, trying to gain intelligence on their positions. The revelations were particularly damning given the good-faith nature of climate negotiations. “After almost 30 years of this kind of thing,” one longtime participant in these talks puts it, “what measure of trust can possibly exist? How do you strike a deal on issues that are central to your country’s survival with someone you think is out to screw you?”

Issues of trust aside, several things are immediately apparent to me in Bonn about the content and design of the agreement that is likely to emerge in Paris next year. One is that it is going to disappoint and anger a lot of people, particularly those who think the job of a climate treaty is to force big polluters to change their ways. The Paris agreement will largely be a “bottom up” treaty, in which each country will put forward a “contribution” for what each is willing to do to reduce carbon pollution. Those contributions will then be reviewed in the future – exactly how and by whom isn’t clear – to make sure each nation is keeping its promise. There will be no legally binding caps on emissions, no mandated “targets” that countries need to reach. In fact, it will not be a treaty at all (a treaty would need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which everyone knows will never happen). It will likely be an agreement “with legal force,” which means, basically, that some parts of the agreement might be legally binding in some countries.

However toothless this approach might seem, there is logic behind it. Since Kyoto, international climate efforts have largely failed because they were too prescriptive. Few nations were willing to bow to the demands of an international carbon police. And beyond that, there was no way to enforce carbon limits.

But even if the talks succeed in creating a sustainable basis for international cooperation, whatever emerges from Paris next year is extremely unlikely to put the world on a path that would limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F), which was enshrined in the Copenhagen Accord as the threshold for dangerous climate change. For that to happen, says the Tyndall Centre’s Kevin Anderson, “global emissions from energy need to reach a peak by around 2020, and then rapidly reduce to zero by 2050 at the latest.” “I’m not giving up hope,” Kerry told me. “Physically, it’s possible. But politically, it will be very difficult.” Podesta is even more blunt. “If we wait until we have a binding international agreement that actually puts us on track for 2 C,” he says, “we’ll hit 2 C before we get an agreement. But we have to get started if we hope to get to the destination.”

The second revelation is that the Paris agreement is likely to be more about money than about carbon. That is not inappropriate: Climate change is, at its base, an environmental-justice issue, in which the rich nations of the world are inflicting damage on the poor ones. One question that has always haunted climate agreements is, how should the victims be compensated? In past U.N. agreements, developed countries have promised aid to poorer nations. But in translating these general commitments into hard numbers, says Elliot Diringer, a climate-policy expert at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, “the cash flows really have never been enough.”

In Paris, they will try again. The delivery vehicle of choice is called the Green Climate Fund, which was one of the few concrete accomplishments to come out of Copenhagen. The idea is simple: Rich countries pay into the fund, the fund’s 24-member board examines proposals from developing countries for clean-energy and climate-adaptation projects, and then it awards funds to those it finds worthy.

The Green Climate Fund was born in the closing days of the Copenhagen negotiations, when then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tried to lure China and other developing nations into a deal by promising that, in exchange for agreeing to a binding cap on carbon pollution as well as outside monitoring and verification of pollution rates, rich nations like the U.S. would pledge a combined $100 billion a year to help poor nations. Many negotiators thought it was a clever (or not so clever) ploy by the U.S. to make China take the fall for the collapse of the Copenhagen deal, since it was clear that China considers emissions data a state secret and would never allow outsiders to pore through the books. But regardless of the intentions, the deal fell apart. The $100 billion promise lingered, however, and was codified in later agreements. (Although $100 billion sounds like a lot, it’s a small part of the $1 trillion a year that will be necessary to transform the energy system.)

Right now, developed nations have a long way to go to live up to Clinton’s promise. The Green Climate Fund has taken four years to get up and running, and still nobody knows if it will primarily make loans or grants. So far, only Germany has come through with a meaningful pledge, offering $1 billion over the next nine years. Stern says the U.S. is putting “a lot of blood, sweat and tears” into getting the fund set up right, and that the $100 billion a year will come from a variety of sources, including private investment. But if the point of the fund is to demonstrate the commitment of rich nations to help the poor, it will need them to make real financial commitments. “Big new public funds are not viable,” says David Victor, a climate-policy expert at the University of California, San Diego. “This could be a train wreck of false expectations.”

In Bonn, the biggest question on many negotiator’s minds was, “Will China step up?” Despite the fact that China is the biggest carbon emitter on the planet, with the most dynamic economy in the world, the Chinese remain wedded to a 25-year-old idea that China is still a developing country, in the same category as, say, Uganda, and therefore not responsible for taking action. At least, not until the U.S. and the EU – which, with their cumulative emissions, have essentially caused the problem of global warming – take the first step. Among negotiators, China’s stance is widely viewed as a negotiating tactic to lower expectations for action and to allow it to play moral defender for other developing nations, some of whom fear that if China makes a big move, it will increase the pressure on them to do the same.

I got a preview of the kind of arguments U.S. negotiators will face when I bumped into Zou Ji, the deputy director general for the National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation and a key member of the Chinese negotiating team, in the lobby of the Maritim Hotel. I asked him if the recent action by Obama to limit pollution from power plants and increase fuel-efficiency standards had changed the dynamics in the negotiations. “It is a good thing,” Ji told me. “But now, America says to us, ‘Your turn to step up.’ Well, we welcome what you have done, but we want to see more action from the U.S. first. It is very clear that Congress is a big constraint for you; Obama can only do what he can do.” Ji argues, accurately, that the U.S. is still the far richer country, and while China’s carbon emissions are enormous, if you break it down to per-capita emissions, the average American is responsible for dumping almost three times as much CO2 into the atmosphere every year as the average Chinese.

I point out to him that this is true, but that cumulative emissions in China will soon dwarf those in the United States.

“China needs to do its part, but right now the U.S. still has huge potential to do more,” he says forcefully. “I have lived in the U.S., where everyone has a clothes dryer and an air conditioner and a big refrigerator and a big house and a big car. In the EU and Japan, they also live well, but people there only consume half the energy Americans do. You do have the capacity to live at the same standard and consume far less – if you choose.”

When Kerry’s plane lands in Beijing, we immediately jump into a line of SUVs and are whisked away to the Great Wall just north of the city for what one State Department staffer calls “a little cultural sightseeing.” When I visited the wall a few years ago, the air pollution was so bad, I could hardly see 15 feet in front of me; today, it’s clear enough to see the Xishan Mountains, which are 12 miles away at the western edge of the city. Kerry strolls along the wall with Chinese dignitaries, then we motorcade to the Marriott hotel in central Beijing, where the U.S. government has taken over two floors. Security is high: The entrance to the hotel is blocked, and armed agents are everywhere. The biggest concern seems to be Chinese spies; on an earlier trip to China, five members of Todd Stern’s team received spoof e-mails that contained a bot that could have given a hacker control of their computers, and shortly after I check into my hotel, I am told that I can assume my room is bugged and my e-mail is read. Across the street from the hotel is an Apple Store, Gucci, Hermès and, strangely, a coal-fired power plant with clouds and a blue sky painted on the sides, as if to disguise the dirty black rocks burning within.

The next morning, Chinese President Xi Jinping opens the talks at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, an elegant retreat in western Beijing. His address to 500 or so American and Chinese dignitaries isn’t exactly a rousing call to action on climate change. Instead, he talks about the importance of keeping the Chinese economy humming, declaring that China needs a peaceful and stable environment “more than ever.” Xi is a tough-looking guy with a Tony Soprano vibe, and his speech leaves no doubt that he sees China as the rising power. “It is natural that China and the U.S. may have different views, and even frictions, on certain issues,” he says. Then he adds, “Confrontation between China and the United States would definitely spell disaster for the two countries and for the wider world.” Xi only mentions climate change once, in a passing reference to it as a significant challenge that both nations face.

Protestors take to the streets to fight construction of a chemical factory in May 2013. (Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

Xi, who came to power in 2013, is “a very strong leader for China,” says Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution. Li contrasts him with other recent Chinese leaders, most of whom tended to be pale figures who dutifully rose through the ranks of the Communist Party. Xi, who is 61, rules with authority and efficiency. He grew up the son of a deputy prime minister and revolutionary who was known as an architect of China’s special economic zones, which were important drivers in the liberalization of China. As president, Xi has cracked down on corruption and is a fierce defender of Chinese interests in disputed territories like the South China Sea. He has also toughened up China’s internal security forces (China spends more on domestic security than it does on national defense). But U.S. officials who have had close contact with Xi are impressed by his directness. One White House staffer pointed to a recent agreement to reduce hydrofluorocarbons, a potent greenhouse gas, that Xi worked out with Obama last year. “Xi rolled the Chinese bureaucracy to get that done,” the staffer says. Kerry also sees him as an effective leader. “I had long conversations with Xi while I was chair of the Foreign Relations Committee,” he tells me. “The kind of action we’ve seen in China recently doesn’t happen without his personal commitment.”

When Kerry takes the podium after Xi steps down, he is conciliatory. He reassures Xi and other Chinese leaders in the room that the U.S. does not seek to “contain” China, and that it welcomes the emergence of “a peaceful, prosperous China that . . . chooses to play a responsible role in world affairs.” He, too, talks a lot about economic growth and how “the true measure of our success will not be just whether our countries grow, but how our countries grow.” Kerry continues, “Step by step, we are shifting our focus . . . to the inescapable reality of a clean-energy future.”

When Kerry travels to countries where the U.S. might be perceived to have the upper hand, he can be very blunt about the potential ravages of climate change. A few months ago, in a speech in Jakarta, Indonesia, he called it the “world’s most fearsome” weapon of mass destruction. But Kerry doesn’t say a word here about melting ice caps, rising seas or weapons of mass destruction. Instead, he talks about how clean energy is “the biggest market the world has ever seen.” He talks investment flows, technology sharing and pollution-free prosperity. “Our goal,” Podesta tells me, “is to create a virtuous circle in the Pacific, where they match our ambition, and then we match theirs.”

For the U.S., pushing for action is imperative: If China makes an aggressive move on carbon, it kills a favorite political talking point from climate deniers in Congress. “I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve sat in where the subject of ‘What is China doing?’ comes up,” says Podesta. “For us, it’s important that we take that objection off the table.”

For the Chinese, beyond the obvious motivation to clean up the air, the question is what they want from the U.S. in return. As Kerry put it to me later, “The Chinese have a lot of stuff they want from us. We have natural gas. We have coal. We have clean-energy technology.” How this bargaining works out is the heart of the negotiations and gets into complex areas like protection of intellectual property rights. In the past, the Chinese simply wanted to buy our technology, copy it and manufacture it more cheaply than anyone else. “But that dynamic has changed,” says one Department of Energy official. “Now the deals are much more about joint ventures and shared investment.”

Later in the day, top members of the U.S. and China delegations meet in a conference room on the second floor for the Joint Session on Climate Change and Clean Energy. It is a stiffly formal scene, with Kerry, Podesta, Stern, U.S. Energy Secretary Moniz and science adviser John Holdren on one side of a long mahogany table, and Chinese leaders, including Vice Premier Wang Yang and lead climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua, on the other side. In this more intimate group, the Chinese are much blunter and more forthright about the risks of climate change. But it isn’t clear if this is because they feel more relaxed or because they are more willing to say what the U.S. wants to hear. State Councilor Yang, who opens the discussion, calls climate change “a common and grave challenge to mankind.” He talks about actions the Chinese government has taken to promote clean energy and efficiency, and he underscores China’s support of the UNFCCC climate negotiations. “We have also maintained close dialogue in consultation on [the U.S.’s and China’s] respective climate-change policies,” he says.

Kerry nods politely and then reads from prepared remarks: “Every one of us in this room is well aware that the climate crisis is one that respects no border. It’s transboundary. It affects the planet.”

The Chinese leaders listen carefully, just as the American team listened carefully to Yang’s remarks, attuned to nuances and gestures that gain trust or lose it, that show respect or haughtiness. And yet, I get the strong sense at this meeting, and at every other one I’ve attended, that 15 levels of chess are being played, that the motives and impulses of each side remain unknowable to the other, and that both sides are making calculations that will shape their careers, their economies and the future of the planet. And always the fear – expressed in the glint of an eye, a moment of hesitation – that each is being played. The Chinese worry that the U.S. won’t keep their word or has a secret plan to thwart their economic growth; the Americans worry that the Chinese are using shady data, and that they are only in it for the money.

Sometimes, the enormous gap between how the Chinese run their country and how the Americans run theirs reveals itself. One of those moments occurs on the second day of the talks in the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square, which is China’s parliamentary chamber. Kerry and Yang appear at a press conference to bestow six “EcoPartnership” awards to American and Chinese organizations that are collaborating on clean-energy and climate solutions. In the context of the talks, it is a small-bore event, with a handful of dignitaries and some Chinese press.

But maybe because of this, Kerry’s remarks at the event are looser and less diplomatic than anything I’ve heard him say earlier. They are also more dangerous politically, because he talks about the one thing the Chinese leadership is most afraid of: the power of social activism. He describes how, in 1970, after 20 million Americans attended Earth Day rallies, public outrage led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as well as the passage of the Clean Air Act and, later, the Clean Water Act. “So I have seen the power of grassroots action, of local efforts becoming magnified and ultimately creating action at a larger, federal level,” Kerry says, his voice rising. “And I see that same kind of drive, that same kernel of innovation, and of demand for a difference, right here [in China], today.”

Kerry’s larger point is undoubtedly true – there is a rising consciousness of environmental issues in China, a sense that civilized societies don’t let their rivers catch fire. But as Kerry knows very well, there will be no organized demonstrations of millions of people marching on the streets in China, demanding change. If they tried, they would likely be tear-gassed or thrown in jail. Activism, such as it is in China, is either well-behaved and sanctioned by the state, or it is deemed reckless and dangerous and quickly shut down.

After his remarks at the Great Hall of the People, Kerry gets polite applause and then sits down to listen to a boilerplate speech from Yang. If anyone noticed that the secretary of state of the United States had just suggested that a populist movement in the People’s Republic of China could challenge the status quo, it wasn’t apparent.

One person who understands the dangers of social activism as well as anyone is Shuo Li, 27, a climate-policy officer for Greenpeace East Asia. Shortly after Kerry’s talk, I visited Li at Greenpeace’s office in Beijing. A year earlier, Greenpeace had published an investigation into the development of a coal-to-liquids plant in Inner Mongolia. Transforming coal into liquid fuels like diesel (or, in a similar process, natural gas) is expensive and, more importantly, an environmental disaster. Compared with typical refining processes, coal liquefaction produces 14 times the amount of carbon dioxide.

What’s interesting about Greenpeace’s investigation is that it targeted the owner of the plant, Shenhua Group, which is China’s biggest coal producer and a political powerhouse. (“Shenhua is the monster,” Li says.) In the U.S., enviros go after big companies all the time. But in China, this kind of action is unprecedented. As was its effectiveness. Li says the company called in Greenpeace, and Shenhua agreed to quit pumping out groundwater for use in the plant.

I ask Li if this is a sign that Chinese leaders are becoming more tolerant of environmental activism?

“Maybe a little,” Li says. He explains that unlike, say, publicly celebrating the Dalai Lama or arguing for the ethical treatment of the Uighur minority in China, it’s OK to raise questions about environmental problems. “But you have to do it the right way. You can go after local officials or individual power plants.” But, as he points out, there is no clear line between what is acceptable and what is not. “That is something everyone has to discover for themselves,” he says. He adds with a sly smile: “For the government, it is more effective that way.”

But Li knows he’s treading dangerous ground. In 2012, a 65-year-old former forestry official was threatened with five years in prison for publishing and distributing books that questioned the overdevelopment of Hainan Island in southern China. (He received a three-year suspended sentence and a fine.) Two years earlier, one of Beijing’s most respected science reporters, Fang Xuanchang, who earned a reputation for calling bullshit on many government-funded research projects, was brutally beaten on his way home from work. His assailants were never found. The message, as one journalist wrote in Foreign Policy, was clear: “Don’t go there, or you could be next.”

I asked about the rising number of protests around the country against industrial plants found to be dumping chemicals­ into rivers, or protesters throwing bricks at police to halt the construction of a new power plant. “Individual NIMBY actions are acceptable,” Li says. “But when you try to mobilize people on a larger scale, that is when you get in trouble.”

“Trouble, how?”

“You don’t even want to think about it,” Li answers, fear flashing in his eyes.

The rise of China, which was driven by the biggest and fastest industrial revolution the world has ever seen, was fueled almost entirely by coal. And its continued success – not to mention, in many ways, the fate of human civilization – depends on how quickly it can wean itself off this cheap, dirty, abundant fossil fuel. “The big question,” Moniz told me in Beijing, “is how fast they can bend down the curve of coal.”

“Bending down the curve of coal” is geek-speak for reducing dependency on coal. Because coal – by far the most carbon­intensive fossil fuel – will most likely be replaced by cleaner energy sources; in that case, the moment China’s coal consumption plateaus will also be the moment their greenhouse-gas pollution plateaus. And that could be the moment the world begins a transition toward a stable climate.

But the question is: When will that moment occur? In China, this question will not be answered by the invisible hand of the market but, ultimately, by the strong hand of President Xi and other party leaders. Xi and his advisers will make a complex economic and political calculation about how far they want to push clean energy – and whether they want to encourage a shift away from coal by, say, expanding the existing carbon-trading market, passing a straightforward tax on carbon, or simply issuing a dictum that caps the amount of coal the nation can consume. A few weeks before my conversation with Moniz, a respected Chinese academic had speculated that China would cap coal consumption by 2030. “That would be a big step in the right direction,” Gore told me. But as Gore well knows, unless that cap is followed by a radical and almost unimaginable global shift toward zero-carbon energy, it’s not a big enough step to avert climate chaos in the coming decades.

China has already taken a number of measures to move away from coal. It is reportedly closing down 50,000 small coal-fired furnaces and has essentially stopped building new coal plants in big eastern cities like Beijing and Shanghai. In 2020, burning coal will be banned in Beijing. But given the enormity of China’s coal addiction, these are just baby steps compared to what is needed.

And that’s one reason why the Chinese are very interested in natural gas. Natural gas has about half the carbon of coal, and burning it creates much less air pollution. China has the biggest shale-gas reserves in the world and would dearly like to unleash an American-style fracking boom (which is its own kind of environmental nightmare, of course). But the technology used to extract the gas from shale, which was invented in the U.S., is complex and not easy to replicate. In addition, shale gas in China is more deeply buried than in the U.S., and the soil is less porous, making the gas more difficult to extract. And thanks to methane leaks during fracking operations (methane, the principal component of natural gas, is a short-lived but potent greenhouse gas), the climate benefits of natural gas are questionable.

Imagining a fracked-out China is not pretty, but it might beat the alternative – making natural gas out of coal. The process is similar to the coal-to-liquids plant in Inner Mongolia that Greenpeace singled out, and like that process, it is both water- and carbon-intensive. China already has two coal-to-gas plants in operation, with as many as 48 more on the drawing board. Most of them are slated to be built in western China, far from population centers, where Chinese leaders are eager to spur development and provide jobs. But the cost to the atmosphere will be enormous. If all of these plants get built, they will collectively emit more than a billion tons of CO2 each year – more than the entire nation of Germany emitted last year.

Moniz calls coal-to-gas plants in western China “a major issue” for Chinese and U.S. negotiators. “Burning natural gas may help them solve the problem of air pollution,” says Moniz. “But if they get it by manufacturing it from coal, they will be creating another, much larger problem.” And it’s one that impacts everyone on the planet.

The talks ended on a hot, humid afternoon in the Zhongnanhai compound in central Beijing, which houses offices for the Politburo’s most senior members. The compound, which is heavily guarded and closed to the public, is a reminder of China’s Imperial era, with a collection of traditional pavilions scattered around three lovely lakes. Kerry met with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang in the Purple Light Pavilion, a brightly painted pagoda-style building with small porcelain animals on the corners of the roof. Li has none of the bluster – or power – of President Xi, and after exchanging greetings and thank-yous, Kerry seemed eager to hit the road. They spoke in private for a half-hour, then Kerry climbed back into his SUV, and we motorcaded back to the Marriott for a final press conference.

Within minutes, the State Department was e-mailing a list of accomplishments to reporters, including joint U.S.-China demonstration projects on smart grids, technology to capture carbon from coal plants, and new initiatives on forestry and industrial boilers. It was all both important and unimportant, small steps in a long, long march. Later, Kerry would tell me he was impressed by what he’d seen from the Chinese on climate during the trip – “There was no backsliding,” he says. Others on the U.S. team described their sense that key Chinese leaders they’d met were “extraordinarily forward-leaning.”

But huge questions still loom about how far the U.S. and China and every other big polluter on the planet will go to cut emissions. For negotiators who are pushing for a tough agreement with meaningful reductions and clear financial accounting, the biggest fear is not that the U.S. and China won’t agree on key issues, but that they will agree on too much: “We are afraid that the U.S. and China will strike a bargain that makes them both comfortable, but does little or nothing to reduce the risk of climate change,” says Mohamed Adow, senior adviser for Christian Aid, a U.K.-based relief agency that works in many developing nations. “Then the rest of the world will have to decide if they want to go along, or fight for a stronger agreement.”

A few hours later, Kerry and his team jet off to Afghanistan. The world is a big, complicated place, and everyone – even the most committed climate warriors like Kerry – has a lot of other things to think about beyond how much carbon we are dumping into the atmosphere. And that, in a way, is always the problem: There is always something more urgent, more immediately catastrophic to seize the attention of policymakers – and in the coming years, many of the crises that will distract us from dealing with the realities of climate change will largely have been caused by climate change. Through all these short-term emergencies, the Earth will keep warming, the droughts will get worse, food will grow scarce, ice will vanish, the seas will rise, and starting around 2030, climate change will emerge from the background and eventually become the only thing we talk about. It will be the story of the century.

When we get to the Marriott, I walk across the sleek marble lobby with Podesta, who looks uncharacteristically somber. Just before we step into Kerry’s press conference – where he will again underscore the importance of taking action on climate change – I ask Podesta if two days of talks with the Chinese have made him feel more hopeful about Paris next year.

ChinaFotoPress / Getty Images. This LED screen displays the rising sun in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which is shrouded in heavy smog on Jan. 16, 2014.

Updated on Jan. 17, 2014 at 5:32 a.m EST.

Air pollution in the Chinese capital reached new, choking heights on Thursday. Those who still felt the urge to catch a glimpse of sunlight were able to gather around the city’s gigantic LED screens, where this glorious sunrise was broadcast as part of a patriotic video loop.

This post has been revised to reflect that the sunrise was not broadcast specifically for that day.

A worker holds white rats at an animal laboratory of a medical school in 2008 in Chongqing, China.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

China considers allowing sale of some cosmetics without requiring them to be tested on animals.

The proposal covers products made in China, but not imported products

Campaign group said change came quicker than expected

But does not expect wholesale end to animal testing of cosmetics in China

Hong Kong (CNN) — Cosmetic companies and animal rights groups have welcomed a proposal by China to allow sales of some cosmetics without requiring them to be tested on animals.

Animal testing would no longer be mandatory for “non-specialized cosmetics”, including shampoo, soaps and certain skin products manufactured in China from June next year, according to a document posted on the website of the China Food and Drug Administration earlier this month.

Beauty companies have long faced an ugly dilemma in China.

Local laws and regulations require animal testing for cosmetic products sold in the country, which has made the lucrative market a tricky area for brands that want to sell in China without alienating consumers in other places that frown upon animal testing.

“Non-specialized cosmetics produced in China could avoid toxicological testing after going through risk and safety checks,” the China Food and Drug Administration said.

Imported cosmetics are not covered in the proposal. But the document indicated that China would gradually ease regulations on animal testing, which would allow more international firms opposed to animal testing to enter China’s 134 billion yuan ($22 billion) cosmetics market.

Current regulations require all cosmetics to go through a lengthy approval process known as “toxicological testing” which involves testing on animals like rabbits and guinea pigs.

“The Body Shop welcomes the signals that the Chinese authorities are adopting a new approach to cosmetic testing,” spokeswoman Louise Terry said in emailed comments from London.

“We have campaigned against animal testing for over 20 years and we look forward to selling our products in China one day.”

Cosmetic brand Urban Decay last year abandoned plans to sell its products in China in response to pressure from consumers and campaign groups, according to Cruelty Free International.

Dave Neale, animal welfare director at campaign group Animal Asia, told CNN the planned changes had come quicker than expected given that local campaigns against animal testing have only been going for two years.

“That’s a very significant development because it took many years for European Union to allow these products to be sold (without being tested on animals).”

Earlier this year, a complete ban on the sale of cosmetics developed through animal testing took effect in the European Union.

But Neale added that this proposal would not mark the end of animal testing in China.

“As far as I’m aware, products can still be tested on animals. It just opens the opportunity for non-animal products to be sold,” he said.